Goss plaudits obnoxious and parochial says Barnaby Joyce

BARNABY Joyce has said while Wayne Goss was a great premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen should also be “celebrated” as an “exemplary leader”.

BARNABY Joyce has criticised as “obnoxious” accounts of Wayne Goss’s impact on Queensland, saying Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen should also be “celebrated” as an “exemplary leader”.

Mr Goss, the reforming Queensland premier who died yesterday, aged 63, has been credited as dragging his state “into the sunlight after 32 years in darkness” under corrupt National Party rule.

Mr Goss implemented the recommendations of Tony Fitzgerald’s landmark corruption inquiry, the findings of which resulted in the jailing of four ministers and the state’s police chief.

Mr Joyce, a former Queensland Nationals senator, acknowledged Mr Goss was “a great man” who did “a great job” as premier.

“But this idea that he took the hick out of Queensland and somehow Queenslanders were the diminutive people and then all of a sudden they had an epiphany, I find slightly obnoxious,” the Agriculture Minister told ABC Radio.

“Wayne Goss did an extremely good job as a politician, certainly he brought a change of direction, but the calibre of people was the same before and after he was there — there was no remarkable change, no seismic shift, no the scales falling off people’s eyes.

“I find it a sort of obnoxious, parochial and somewhat maligning statement to say someone took the hick out of Queensland is some kind of moral statement as to what the people were like beforehand.

“Remember, Queensland was a backwater and Bjelke-Petersen turned it into an economic powerhouse. It was the envy of other states, its treasury was overflowing with money, it electrified its central Queensland railways, it built the dams, it built the international airports, it had taken small towns to what would then grow to be major cities.

“Let’s not deride the accomplishments of one because it befits our notion of the politics of the next; let’s celebrate both as both being exemplary leaders and both having done a great job.”

Mr Joyce agreed Mr Goss should be congratulated for implementing the Fitzgerald inquiry recommendations, but added: “Who brought about the Fitzgerald inquiry? Who called for it? Bjelke-Petersen!”

The Fitzgerald inquiry was launched in 1987 in Bjelke-Petersen’s absence by then acting premier, Bill Gunn, who ordered what was expected to be a limited inquiry into a small group of police and their alleged involvement in illegal gambling and prostitution.

The inquiry changed the policing and political landscape in Queensland and across Australia. Significant prosecutions followed the inquiry leading to four ministers being jailed and numerous convictions of other police.

Former Police Commissioner Sir Terence Lewis was convicted of corruption, jailed, and stripped of his knighthood, and former Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was charged with perjury for evidence given to the inquiry, although the trial was aborted due to a hung jury.

The jury foreman, Luke Shaw, was later exposed as a Young Nations member and the cousin of a secretary employed by Lady Bjelke-Petersen. She said in 1994 “they would have plonked” the former premier in jail had not Mr Shaw been on the jury.

Mr Goss’s former press secretary, Denis Atkins, yesterday said the Labor premier “made Queensland respectable again” and “took the hick out” of the state.

“Queensland had a terrible reputation through the 70s and 80s as the place that didn’t favour or foster intellectualism, it was a place where the public service was more a branch of the political party in power and it was a place where ultimately we saw corruption in the levels and Wayne Goss turned that around,” Atkins, now a News Corp Australia journalist, said.

Premier Campbell Newman, campaigning for office in 2012, said the Bjelke-Petersen government “certainly was a period of Queensland’s history where a lot of terrible things happened and there was clearly corruption and it’s all there in the report of the royal commission.”

Mr Joyce was a senator for Queensland between 2005 and 2013, when he resigned to contest the NSW seat of New England.